Brand new Seagate HDD has high raw read error rate

It seems it may be a count of the actual sectors read, the errors are in the upper 16bits of the 48bit word, please see

http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/Seagate_SER_RRER_HEC.html

Note: the original link is to a now-defunct Seagate Forums, but Wayback Machine shows it is also authored by fzabkar, whose personal page I now link to.

On my Seagate drives I have high decimal numbers, but when converted to hex I in fact have 0 errors in a whole lot of sectors read.

GSmartControl has a comment about this in the tooltip for the raw read error rate:

Note: Some drives (e.g. Seagate) are known to report very high Raw values for this attribute, and it's not an indication of a problem.

The smartmontools FAQ also state

What details can be interpreted from Raw read error rate?

If no documentation is available, the RAW value of attribute 1 is typically useless. The 48-bit field might encode several values, try -v 1,hex48 to check.